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Well we all know what AMD PR campaigns have said for many years now - it's should all be open source so long as amd's competitors own the proprietary knowledge and software excellence, they should give it to all (meaning amd) for free.

This is just another great and holier than thou open sourcing driver plan. AMD sits on it's stupid butt, and someone else does all the work. AMD doesn't pay them, likely bad mouths them, and embarrassingly, articles need to point out alternatives to amd because they suck so badly.

Open source is the future of amd, the past, and the present, and it sucks.Reply

Not sure where you are getting this.AMD has never planned to stop releasing proprietary drivers.AMD isn't open sourcing their proprietary drivers.They released some information (wish they gave more) for the open source community to use to make it own open source drivers.However, the closed source nature of their proprietary drivers preclude the use of any GPLed code.

It makes no sense for them to rely on a third party to fix their problems.There is no guarantee that a third party will do the job.There is no guarantee that the third party won't screw something else up in the process.There is no visibility to the general public.As familiar as I am with the Omega drivers and kX Project, I've only just now heard of leshcatlabs.I can't imagine your average Joe knows about them when most I've talked to don't even know about Omega drivers.Many computers that cross my desk have drivers a year or more old, so even AMD drivers didn't have enough visibility until they built automatic driver updates into the control center.

Yeah, AMD has plenty of problems to work out, but you're barking up the wrong tree.What they really need to work on (and probably are) is acquiring and retaining good low level programmers to better support their increasing commitments.Reply

So you pretend to, or do completely miss the points (with so little historical knowledge), you admit as much, then completely agree with me anyway, and finally delude yourself into thinking amd's mass firings means they are working on getting good programmers because you admit their drivers do suck...

If before they fired a big % of their driver team mobile support was dodgy, what do you expect it to be like now? Also when times are bad the best devs tend to leave because they can. Bottom line is they simply don't have the capability to support everything they are meant to support.Reply

When did amd fire any part of the gfx driver team? I know they eliminated some of the developers that did linux drivers and compiler stuff for cpus and some other stuff but none of them had anything to do with the graphics divisionReply

For me on a Sandy Bridge System (Dell Vostro 3450 with 6630M) it works when I first install the old Dell-supplied driver (to get the AMD signed Intel driver) and afterwards install over that the most recent 13.1. The Intel driver is not updated (as 13.1 only supports Ivy Bridge) but I get the most recent for the AMD card. Guess the only problem with this method is that I am stuck with a nearly 2 years old Intel driver...I don not really get why AMD is unable to deliver a driver for Sandy Bridge. The only problem is obviously the lack of the singned Intel driver. But mod-driver makers somehow have absolutely no problem in releasing a woking and totally uptodate driver.Reply

AMD releases their intellectual property hardware designs, and fanboys the world over come home to daddy licking the feet happily, while hundreds of others feverishly produce the software support needed... "open sourcing" the great release that is the absolutely superior amd hardware !

Tah dahhh ! AMD spends zero dollars, and suck up the glorious driver freebies from the most fanatic programmer fanboys in the wild. Then they take that "open source" driver and have their hacks learn a few things "for free" by examining it.

It's a win win win win. AMD wins not spending a dime, fanboys win in their glorious pursuit of proving AMD is the best and writing up the driver goods to attempt to do so, and then AMD wins again glomming onto the open source in the wild work and trying to figure out what to do if they wanted to make one a driver of their own that actually works. Then AMD basks in the glory of the unpaid fanboy driver writers that give their lives and economic health away for free to the CCC (stands for communist communist communist) Gamers MANIFESTO company.

So uh.. Cerise, if you're not an "AMD fanboy" then obviously you're an "Intel fanboy" - what's your point? If you don't want to use Windows, and you don't want to use AMD - then don't use them.

Guess what, open source drivers, or any software for that matter tends to allow people to discover exploits a lot faster than closed source does. Are you mad because you can't figure out how to exploit the drivers, or are you mad because you can't use Linux on your computer?

Cuz like.. if you're not an AMD fanboy, then why are you using an AMD processor in your computer and wasting your time posting on the Anandtech forums?

Or aren't you.

Because in that case, I guess you're simply a troll.

I mean it's just business right? I'm sure Intel, as a company, is a million times better than AMD ever was... :: cough :: Reply

Open source developers have been begging hardware vendors to release sufficient info for their hardware to enable driver development for years. Before 3D graphics was even much of a concern on any platform. And when some people were still excited about the upcoming Netburst platform and RD-RAM. Sure they'd like hardware developers to release open source drivers themselves, but they know they're not always going to get it so sufficient technical details has always been considered a minimum for any company which wants to be considered somewhat open source friendly. Reply